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Monday, December 20, 2010

One of Those Nights

Charlie woke up right around 1:30 because he needed a drink of water. He went right back to sleep, but I wasn't so lucky. I tossed and turned for two hours after that thanks to a stream of random thoughts running through my head.

It started out with thinking about how to explain shadows to a toddler (that's his newest obsession - the shadow on the ceiling that appears when he turns his light on and disappears when he turns it off. "Where did shadow go? What's shadow doing?"). Then it moved on to reminiscing about how I was too scared to walk down the hall to my parents room because I was just positive that Skeletor lived in the hallway closet. Where did that come from?

Then I started thinking about the other things I used to be afraid of when I was little, namely that vampires lived in the sewers and would come up out of the toilet when you flushed it. I used to stand as far away as possible and push the flush lever with one finger and then turn around and run out of the bathroom as fast as I could. Sometimes I even enlisted my siblings to come sit by the door and tell me jokes while I flushed so I wouldn't have to think about it. We were weird like that, and called them "bathroom jokes."

That led me to thinking more about the house I grew up in and how weird it was - my dad and my grandfather built it and some things about it were just "off," like how there were no closets other than in the upstairs hallway and there was a huge window in the bathroom right over the toilet and only a little tiny window in the playroom.

The next logical step from there was to start thinking of the neighborhood kids that we used to play with, and my friends from elementary and junior high, and how we used to go christmas caroling and play the piano and sing awful show tunes.

Then I relived the day we moved to Ohio and how bad it sucked and how miserable I was. But I made friends, some of whom I miss dearly. So I started thinking about my old friends and old times and how much trouble we used to get into, and what would have happened if I had started dating my old buddy from high school when he showed up in my philosophy class in college, before I had met Charlie, and then being glad that I didn't, because I have a very lovely life and if we had dated even for a few weeks I probably wouldn't have ended up meeting Charlie, at all.

I thought about the music we used to listen to and the million games of laser tag and the slam book and some other random happenings that I'm not about to broadcast to the interwebs.

And after that it was just random, like trying to remember where we had dinner on our anniversary each year, or studying the flashing light on the smoke detector and wondering when we last changed the batteries, or thinking about the peppermint bark setting in the fridge and the other stuff I had made over the weekend and whether there would be enough to share with everyone and enough to take with us for the trip.

2 comments:

Your post reminded me of when I was a child and I was afraid that spiders were under my bed. I used to make my mom tuck my blankets all around me like a cocoon because I thought that would keep the spiders off of me. I still do that sometimes.